Sunday, January 15, 2012

How Far Have We Come?

I am on a plane traveling to Atlanta for the North American
Jewish Day School Conference.Over 600
Jewish educators will come together for the next three days to share, reflect
and learn from each other.I look
forward to writing about the conference, but not right now…

For me, the notion of flying to Atlanta, the birthplace of
Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the weekend of his birthday and the
National holiday which marks his birth, is quite powerful. In school on Friday,
our 3rd graders and their teachers conducted a wonderful assembly
that taught all of our students a bit of the civil rights movement and about
Dr. King’s life and vision.Historically
accurate and appropriate for the K-8 crowd, the assembly program stopped short
of bringing the issues to the modern day.

We have come a long way since the days of state sponsored
segregation.But as I reflect on our
world today, how far have we really come and how much further to we have to
go?As a parent, I can’t help but think
about my children and what they know, how they see the world and how the world
in which they are being raised will welcome them. I also wonder if I am giving them enough to be
agents of change—the tools, the desire and the commitment to these values. We live in a world of inequality, where men
still make more money than women, where communities and neighborhoods are not
fully integrated, not necessarily by design, but there are places that it does
exist.

And in today’s New York Times, a lead article in the New
York edition talks about the challenges in Israel right now, where a segment of
the population wants to limit the public view, the role and the rights of
women.There is so much to say about
this topic and the feelings that it evokes for me as a Jew, as one committed to
Israel and as a person who just can’t understand how this can be allowed in a
modern country.As an educator who will
shortly take 33 8th graders to Israel, I am thinking about what this
means to them and what my obligation is to show them and to teach them about
what is going on, to enlighten and to educate.I don’t know if there is a link between these two ideas, but I think
there is a lot that we can learn and teach our children that can transform the
next generation.

Change can be a slow process, that I understand, however, I
wonder if our collective consciousness is aware and ready to fully engage in the
next step to making our communities places where we can live out our beliefs
about equality and fulfill the dream of Dr. King while expanding it even
further to make our world that makes us proud.

Yes, we have come a long way, but I think the road ahead of
us is even longer. How far have we really come?